THE HAUNTING OF LISA
They don't get much more bland than this

  Other than a not-bad twist at the end, this obviously made-for-TV crapwagon is about as routine as they get, coming dangerously close to psychic-linkery at points and fulfilling just about all of the requirements that one must meet to be a made-for-TV crapwagon.

Cheryl Ladd plays Ellen, a widowed mother of a little girl who has an upcoming wedding with the town sheriff (Duncan Regehr).  But then her little girl Lisa (Aemilia Robinson) gets a visitation from a glowing, ethereal lady who starts telling her about forgotten children and all sorts of stuff like that, and soon, another girl's dead body is found.  Ellen digs around the spot where Lisa had her vision, and finds another body.  Who did it, what does the ghost want, blah blah blah.

I was hoping that Regehr would help elevate this movie above what it was obviously turning out to be, since he made such a cool Dracula in The Monster Squad.  But no, here he's doing his best Bill Pullman impersonation, and it's not very good.  Everybody else just looks kind of pained.

I do have to give the film some kudos for that little twist at the end; the movie makes great pains to make one character look like he's guilty, to be swallowed by the putzes in the audience.  People who think they're clever (like me) immediately suspected somebody else the moment he walked on screen, someone upon whom suspicion was never overtly cast but still, you just KNOW sometimes.  But it turned out to be a third person, and it wasn't even all that arbitrary (like in The Bone Collector).  Nice touch.  But then the ending totally putzed out, with Ellen surely thanking her lucky stars that those bullets don't go all the way through that body.

In other words, this is precisely what I should've expected from a horror movie shown on WTN.  Sigh.

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